Tag: hack

Excluding One Category From Blog Homepage (WordPress) [en]

[fr] Comment exclure une catégorie de la première page de votre blog WordPress tout en la gardant dans les archives.

The simplest method I’ve found up to now (and I’ve only just found it) if there are certain categories of posts you do not want to see appear on your main blog page, but that you still want to see in the archives, is to use query_posts().

Here’s an example:

This needs to come in right before the while ( have_posts() ) { line. The $query_string parameter means that you can still pass parameters in the URL, so things like special Event Calendar pages will still work.

Careful, though, this only works for one category at a time. You need to use WP_Query for that, and build a separate loop for the homepage.

Remove Paging From WordPress Archives [en]

[fr] Pour supprimer les "pages" de vos archives WordPress, utilisez le code ci-dessous dans le fichier functions.php du thème que vous utilisez.

Thanks a lot to Matt for giving me the code which allows me to remove paging from the archives on this blog. I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time, but didn’t know where to start.

Just add the following code to the functions.php file of your theme.

function yay_nopaging($query) {
if ( !is_home() && !is_feed() && '' === $query->get('nopaging') )
    $query->set('nopaging', 1);
}

add_action('parse_query', 'yay_nopaging');

Unfortunately, this breaks the Recent Posts widget, which starts displaying… all the posts (that’s a lot of them, here). I removed the widget, but if you have a solution, I’d be happy to hear it.

Hack: Make Bunny Tags Point to Your Blog Tagspace [en]

[fr] Un petit bidouillage pour que mon plugin wordpress pour ajouter des tags ne montre (dans Technorati) que les billets de votre propre blog.

Here’s a quick hack for all of you who, like Fabienne, are disappointed that my Bunny’s Technorati Tags plugin points to the technorati tagspace instead of just your own posts.

For it to work, your plugin files need to be writable (how to do this is beyond the scope of this post, but try looking for a way to chmod 777 or whatever in your FTP program; if you use the command line, then chmod -R 777 wp-content/plugins should do it). Then, open the plugin editor (WP admin screen > Plugins > Plugin Editor) and edit the file for Bunny’s Technorati Tags.

Look for this code:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '" title="' . __('See the Technorati tag page for', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

And replace it with this:

 $tag_link='<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/' . urlencode(urldecode($tag))
 . '?from=' . get_settings('home') . '" title="'
 . __('On Technorati: see posts from this blog tagged', 'BunnyTags') . ' ''
 . urldecode($tag) . ''." rel="tag">' . $display_tag . '</a>' . $separator;
 // make a link to the technorati tag page, with tag link text

This isn’t quite the same as pointing them to a page on your blog which contains all the posts. But the final result is pretty similar. Otherwise, Fabienne says that Jerome’s Keywords Plugin does the trick for her.

Basic Bilingual Plugin [en]

This is a simple plugin which wraps together my bilingual hacks to make day-to-day posting less of a hassle.

[fr] Ce plugin pour WordPress regroupe les hacks que j'utilise depuis un moment déjà pour gérer le bilinguisme de mon weblog. Il permet d'afficher un sommaire de chaque billet dans "l'autre langue" et d'appliquer un formattage par langue via l'attribut lang.

Plus de détails sur la page officielle du plugin.

Update 01.02.2007: This plugin broke badly with WordPress 2.1, but has now been (hopefully) updated. The wiki page on wp-plugins.org is frozen and may not be up-to-date anymore. Download here.

This post is the test run for my Basic Bilingual plugin.

It doesn’t add much functionality to what I already have through my hacks, but it’s cleaner from a code point of view, and it’s portable — you can use it too if you wish.

Be patient if the wiki page isn’t exactly up-to-date. It will be shortly — and the plugin will be available through the Plugin Manager as soon as I’ve made sure it’s functional enough (ie, when I press publish and hell doesn’t break loose).

This plugin basically allows you to do what you can see on this weblog: add lang attributes to your posts, excerpts in “the other language”, and localize the date. It also creates permanent fields in the admin pages for entering the language and “other language excerpt” easier.

I’d like to emphasize that this plugin is very simple. It is in no way a replacement of any sort for the larger-scale multilingual efforts going on these days. I wanted to get my code cleaned up and my hacks back in the admin interface (I lost them when I upgraded WP), and I’m making the result public.

Musings on a Multiblog WordPress [en]

Thinking about a solution to make WordPress MultiBlog. Comments, criticism and other ideas welcome — please join the fun. In particular, I bump into a hairy PHP include problem.

[fr] Je réfléchis à comment on pourrait donner à WordPress la capacité de gérer plusieurs blogs avec une installation. Je me heurte à un problème concernant les includes PHP. Feedback et autres idées bienvenues!

Update June 2007: Try WordPress Multi-User now.

I’ve used Shelley’s instructions using soft links. I tried Rubén’s proof-of-concept, but got stuck somewhere in the middle.

So I started thinking: how can we go about making WordPress MultiBlog-capable? Here is a rough transcript of my thoughts (I’ve removed some of the dead ends and hesitations) in the hope that they might contribute to the general resolution of the problem. I have to point out my position here: somebody with a dedicated server who’s thinking of setting up a “WordPress weblog-farm” (for my pupils, mainly). So I’m aware that I’m not the “standard user” and that my solution is going to be impractical to many. But hey, let’s see where it leads, all the same. Actually, I think I probably reconstructed most of Rubén’s strategy here — but I’m not sure to what extent what I suggest differs from what he has done.

From a system point of view, we want to have a unique installation of WordPress, and duplication of only the files which are different from one blog to another (index.php, wp-config.php, wp-comments.php, wp-layout.css, to name a few obvious ones). The whole point being that when the isntall needs to be upgraded, it only has to be upgraded in one place. When a plugin is downloaded and installed, it only has to be done once for all weblogs — though it can of course be activated individually for each weblog.

From the point of view of the weblogs themselves, they need to appear to be in different domains/subdomains/folders/whatever. What I’m most interested in is different subdomains, so I’ll stick to that in my thinking. (Then somebody can come and tell me that my “solution” doesn’t work for subfolders, and here’s one that works for subfolders and subdomains, and we’ll all be happy, thankyouverymuch.) So, when I’m working with blog1.example.com all the addresses need to refer to that subdomain (blog1.example.com/wp-admin/, etc); ditto for blog2.example.com, blog3.example.com, blogn.example.com (I used to like maths in High School a lot).

As Rubén puts it, the problem with symbolic links (“soft links”) is called “soft link hell”: think of a great number of rubber bands stretched all over your server. Ugh. So let’s try to go in his direction, for a while. First, map all the subdomains to the same folder on the server. Let’s say blog1.example.com, blog2.example.com (etc.) all point to /home/bunny/www/wordpress/. Neat, huh? Not so. They will all use the same wp-config.php file, and hence all be the same weblog.

This is where Rubén’s idea comes in: include a file at the top of wp-config.php which:

  1. identifies which blog we are working with (in my case, by parsing $HTTP_HOST, for example — there might be a more elegant solution)
  2. “replaces” the files in the master installation directory by the files in a special “blog” directory, if they exist

The second point is the tricky one, of course. We’d probably have a subfolder per blog in wordpress/blogs: wordpress/blogs/blog1, wordpress/blogs/blog2, etc. The included file would match the subdomain string with the equivalent folder, check if the page it’s trying to retrieve exists in the folder, and if it does, include that one and stop processing the initial script after that. Another (maybe more elegant) option would be to do some Apache magic (I’m dreaming, no idea if it’s possible) to systematically check if a file is available in the subdirectory matching the subdomain before using the one in the master directory. Anybody know if this is feasible?

The problem I see is with includes. We have (at least) three types of include calls:

  • include (ABSPATH . 'wp-comments.php');
  • require ('./wp-blog-header.php');
  • require_once(dirname(__FILE__).'/' . '/wp-config.php');

As far as I see it, they’ll all break if the calling include is in /home/bunny/www/wordpress/blogs/blog1 and the file to be called is in /home/bunny/www/wordpress. What is wrong with relative includes? Oh, they would break too. Dammit.

We would need some intelligence to determine if the file to be included or called exists in the subdirectory or not, and magically adapt the include call to point to the “right” file. I suspect this could be done, but would require modifying all (at least, a lot of) the include/requires in WordPress.

Maybe another path to explore would be to create a table in the database to keep track of existing blogs, and of the files that need to be “overridden” for each blog. But again, I suspect that would mean recoding all the includes in WordPress.

Another problem would be .htaccess. Apache would be retrieving the same .htaccess for all subdomains, and that happens before PHP comes into play, if I’m not mistaken.

Any bright ideas to get us out of this fix? Alternate solutions? Comments? Things I missed or got wrong? The comments and trackbacks are yours. Thanks for your attention.

Batch Categories 0.9 [en]

Batch Categories for WordPress has been fixed and enhanced. If you have major category jobs to do, it can probably help you. Feedback and testers welcome.

[fr] Batch Categories pour WordPress a été corrigé et fonctionne à  présent. Le compagnon idéal si vous desirez changer les catégories de nombreux billets en même temps.

Batch Categories 0.9 is out! It’s the ideal companion for large-scale post-import messy category work. List all posts belonging to a category or matching a keyword, and edit their categories, easily visible at a glace with a collection of sexy drop-down lists. What’s new since the the first draft?

  • It now works, and does not “eat” categories without a warning. (Pretty nice of it, huh?)
  • It tells you what it did — which categories it added to which posts, and which ones it removed.
  • Add a whole bunch of posts to a category with one click.
  • Remove a whole bunch of posts from a category with one click.
  • Ensures that all the categories for a post are always listed, whatever the setting for the limit number of drop-down lists.
  • This is what it can look like.

You can still access it as a plugin or edit the Edit navigation menu, as described in my post introducing Batch Categories. If you’re in a hurry, just drop the PHP file into your wp-admin directory and send your browser straight on it.

Next steps?

  • Gather feedback from courageous testers (please don’t blame me if you haven’t backed up your post2cat table and things go wrong) for chasing the last bugs, improving interface and functionality.
  • Redo the code which generates the drop-down lists to take advantage of the category cache, and avoid flooding the database with useless queries.
  • Allow more subtle selection of posts: combinations of categories (AND/OR/NOT), categories without their subcategories…
  • Anything else you would want…?

Update 24.07.04: BB made me notice that “All” and “None” didn’t make much sense in the drop-down which allows one to select the categories to display. Replaced them in v. 0.91 by “Any category”.